As an alternative to invasive-type surgeries whereby a physician creates an incision to access a desired location in the patient's body, many minimally invasive surgeries and in vivo examinations are being performed using catheters that are inserted into a patient's body. With a catheter in place, medical devices are routed through a lumen in the catheter in order to obtain tissue samples, perform a surgical procedure or diagnose tissue in a patient's body.
To insert a catheter, many physicians first use a guidewire that is routed to a desired location in the patient's body. The guidewire then acts as a rail over which catheters or other medical devices can be easily routed to the desired location.
Typically medical devices for insertion within a patient have a guidewire lumen extending through at least a portion thereof. Generally, the guidewire lumen is sufficiently sized to allow the device to pass over the guidewire freely. General diameters for guidewires are 0.014 to 0.038 inches, therefore the corresponding guidewire lumen must be sized accordingly.
To route a medical device over the guidewire, the guidewire must be inserted into a guidewire lumen of the medical device. Routing the guidewire into the guidewire lumen proves to be difficult for many reasons. For example, many times the tip of the catheter is formed having a curved shape wherein the guidewire lumen is coaxially disposed within the curve. Therefore, in order to dispose the guidewire into the lumen, the operator must straighten the curled tip of the catheter while simultaneously inserting the guidewire. This process may be further complicated by coatings applied to either the guidewire or the catheter, or both, which may make the surfaces slippery thereby hindering the process.
Further still, many modern guidewires include tips of differing flexibilities at their proximal and distal ends, thereby giving the physician the option of adjusting the flexibility depending on which end of the guidewire is inserted into the patient. However, such flexible tips are difficult to use with catheters because they are not stiff enough to be easily disposed within the guidewire lumen without severely bending and possibly kinking the catheter. Therefore, there is a need for a device that helps align and load a guidewire into a guidewire lumen of a medical device.